Details

Description

We were seeing some weird issues with the balancer in our cluster:

1) it can get stuck during an iteration and only restarting it helps
2) the iterations are highly inefficient. With 20 minutes iteration it moves 7K blocks a minute for the first 6 minutes and hundreds of blocks in the next 14 minutes
3) it can hit namenode and the network pretty hard

A few improvements we came up with as a result:
Making balancer more deterministic in terms of running time of iteration, improving the efficiency and making the load configurable:

Make many of the constants configurable command line parameters: Iteration length, number of blocks to move in parallel to a given node and in cluster overall.
Terminate transfers that are still in progress after iteration is over.

Previously iteration time was the time window in which the balancer was scheduling the moves and then it would wait for the moves to finish indefinitely. Each scheduling task can run up to iteration time or even longer. This means if you have too many of them and they are long your actual iterations are longer than 20 minutes. Now each scheduling task has a time of the start of iteration and it should schedule the moves only if it did not run out of time. So the tasks that have started after the iteration is over will not schedule any moves.

The number of move threads and dispatch threads is configurable so that depending on the load of the cluster you can run it slower.

I will attach a patch, please let me know what you think and what can be done better.